Che Guevara (65 page)

Bouncing back from the ill-fated Miami Pact, the redoubtable Felipe Pazos was made president of the National Bank; Justo Carrillo became president of the Development Bank; and the Harvard-educated economist Regino Boti returned from the United States to become minister of the economy. Rufo López Fresquet, an economist and analyst for the influential conservative newspaper
Diario de la Marina
, was named minister of finance. Foreign affairs went to the Ortodoxo politician Roberto Agramonte. Others, such as Faustino Pérez, who was appointed to head the newly created Ministry for the Recovery of Illegally Acquired Property, came from the July 26 Movement’s right wing. The Education Ministry went to Armando Hart, while Che’s wartime antagonist Enrique Oltuski became minister of communications. Fidel’s old publisher friend, Luis Orlando Rodríguez, who had helped set up Radio Rebelde and
El Cubano Libre
, was made interior minister. Another new post, minister for revolutionary laws, was given to Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado, a lawyer in Cienfuegos with discreet PSP links. His appointment seemed innocuous enough at the time, but Torrado was to play a key role in Fidel’s future plans.

The cabinet got to work, holding marathon sessions to reform the constitution, rebuild damaged infrastructure, and clean up Cuba’s debauched society. At the top of Urrutia’s agenda was a bill to ban gambling and prostitution. Simultaneously, the new ministers began housecleaning, firing employees who had been receiving secret sinecures, or
botellas
, from the Batista regime. Their initial decrees were of a similar purging nature. Political parties were temporarily banned. Batista’s properties, as well as those of his ministers and of politicians who had participated in the last two Batista-era elections, were confiscated.

Fidel began speaking before large crowds in an ingenious exercise he called “direct democracy.” He would take soundings of the crowd, spontaneous referendums on revolutionary policy. The forums were employed to test, mold, and radicalize the public mood and, ultimately, to pressure the government. Fidel repeated over and over that it was the duty of the new government to obey the will of the people, because the revolution had been fought by the people.

He also began to reform the army, his true power base. The ranks of the “old” army and police forces were weeded out, their officers either sidelined or purged. Colonel Ramón Barquín was made chief of the military academies; Major Quevedo, one of several career officers who had defected to the rebels after the failed summer offensive, became head of army logistics. Others were shipped off to gilded exile as military attachés in foreign countries. The new military elite was made up of loyal rebels. Camilo, already the military governor of Havana province, became the army chief of staff. Augusto Martínez Sánchez, a lawyer who had served as the judge with Raúl’s Second Front, was named minister of defense. Efigenio Ameijeiras, the head of Raúl’s elite “Mau-Mau” guerrilla strike force, became chief of police. The pilot Pedro Díaz Lanz, Fidel’s rebel air force commander, was now given that title officially. Perhaps most telling, loyal July 26 men had been installed as military governors in all of Cuba’s provinces.

It was soon evident that the real seat of revolutionary power lay not in the ornate presidential palace in Old Havana but wherever Fidel happened to be at the time. And Fidel seemed to be everywhere. His base camp was a penthouse suite on the twenty-third floor of the new Havana Hilton in downtown Vedado, but he also slept and worked at Celia Sánchez’s apartment nearby and in a villa in the fishing village of Cojímar, about thirty minutes east of Havana. It was in this villa, rather than at the presidential palace, that the future of Cuba was being decided. Over the coming months it became the setting for nightly meetings between Fidel, his closest comrades, and Communist Party leaders. The purpose of the meetings was to secretly meld the PSP and the July 26 Movement into a single revolutionary party. Fidel, Che, Raúl, Ramiro, and Camilo represented the guerrillas. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Aníbal Escalante, and Blas Roca, the Party’s secretary-general, led discussions for the Communists.

On the surface, Che and Raúl were the odd men out in the distribution of plum appointments. Raúl was military governor of Oriente and Che had the minor title of commander of La Cabaña. But the job descriptions were
misleading. While Fidel concentrated on presenting a moderate front for the revolution and avoiding a premature confrontation with the United States, Raúl and Che worked secretly to cement ties with the PSP and to shore up Fidel’s power base in the armed forces.

Che kept up a formidable pace of activity. On January 13, he inaugurated a military cultural academy in La Cabaña. Classes were given in civics, history, geography, the Cuban economy, “the economic and social characteristics of the Latin American republics,” and current affairs. Che sought to reform his charges. He banned cockfighting and organized chess classes, an equestrian team, sports events, art exhibits, concerts, and theater productions. Movies were shown nightly in the fortresses’ several cinemas. He founded a regimental newspaper,
La Cabaña Libre
, and soon helped kick off
Verde Olivo
, a newspaper for the Revolutionary Armed Forces. Che quietly placed the academy under the supervision of PSP men. Armando Acosta, his commissar in the Escambray, became the academy administrator.

By the end of January, Che had an additional title—chief of the Department of Training of the Revolutionary Armed Forces—but it did not give a full picture of his activities, either. On Fidel’s instructions, he was secretly meeting with Raúl, who shuttled between Havana and his Santiago post; Camilo; Ramiro Valdés, Che’s wartime deputy; and the PSP’s Víctor Pina to create a new state security and intelligence apparatus. The agency, Seguridad del Estado, or G-2, was placed in Valdés’s able hands. Osvaldo Sánchez, a PSP Politburo member and head of its Military Committee, was his second in command.

Meanwhile, Cuban exiles were arriving home from all over the hemisphere. An airplane was sent to Buenos Aires to bring back the exiles living there, and the Guevara family was invited to board it. Che’s parents; his sister Celia; her husband, Luis Argañaraz; and Juan Martín, now a teenager of fourteen, accepted the offer. (Family and work obligations kept Roberto and Ana María at home, and it would be another two and a half years before they saw their famous brother.) They arrived in Havana on January 9. Ernesto senior kissed the tarmac at Havana’s Rancho Boyeros airport. “We were immediately surrounded by bearded soldiers wearing really dirty uniforms and armed with rifles or machine guns,” he wrote. “Then came the obligatory salutes and, in a rush, they led us into the interior of the terminal, where Ernesto awaited us. I understand that they had wanted to surprise him and that he became aware of our arrival only minutes before. My wife ran to his arms and could not contain her tears. A mountain of photographers and television cameras recorded the scene. Soon afterward I hugged my son. It had been six years since I had last seen him.”

La Cabaña, the colonial-era fortress and army garrison that overlooks the harbor and city of Havana. Che assumed command of the bastion on January 3, 1959.

Che with his parents at the Havana airport on January 9, 1959.

One of the photographs taken that day shows Che in fatigues and beret and sparse beard, flanked by his mother and father, amid a tumult of curious onlookers. A submachine gun pokes up into view behind Che’s back. What is truly memorable, though, is the look of deep, passionate pride on Celia’s face, and on Che’s. His conservatively dressed father stands beside them, smiling and looking bemused.

The Guevaras were installed as guests of the revolution in a suite at the Hilton. The hotel’s swank lobby was by now a rowdy meeting place for disheveled armed guerrillas, aggressive journalists, favor-seekers, and perplexed-looking American tourists whose holidays had been interrupted by events. When they got to their rooms, just a few floors below where Fidel was staying, Ernesto senior produced some bottles of Argentine wine that had been his son’s favorite back home. “Their sight surely brought back to him pleasant memories of other happy times, when the whole family lived together in Buenos Aires,” he wrote. As they celebrated, Ernesto senior thought he saw “in his physique, in his expressions, in his happiness, the same boy who had left Buenos Aires one cold July afternoon more than six years before.”

Ernesto senior’s observation contained a fair degree of wishful thinking. His son had become Che, the man he wanted to be. And if Che was pleased to see his family, the truth was they couldn’t have arrived at a more inconvenient time. Even as they settled into the Hilton, he had to rush back to La Cabaña. There were revolutionary tribunals to be overseen.

Throughout January, suspected war criminals were being captured and brought to La Cabaña daily. For the most part, they were not the top henchmen of the ancien régime; most of those had escaped or remained holed up in embassies. The ones left behind were deputies or rank-and-file
chivatos
and police torturers. Nevertheless, the old walls of the fort rang out nightly with the fusillades of the firing squads. “There were over a thousand prisoners of war,” explained Miguel Ángel Duque de Estrada, who had been put in charge of the Cleansing Commission. “Many didn’t have dossiers. We didn’t even know all of their names. But we had a job to do, which was to cleanse the defeated army.”

The trials began at eight or nine in the evening, and, more often than not, a verdict was reached by two or three in the morning. Duque de Estrada gathered evidence, took testimony, and prepared the trials. He also sat with Che, the “supreme prosecutor,” on the appellate bench, where Che made the final decision on men’s fates. “Che consulted with me,” Duque said, “but he was in charge, and as military commander his word was final. We were in agreement on almost 100 percent of the decisions. In about a hundred days we carried out perhaps fifty-five executions by firing squad, and we
got a lot of flak for it, but we gave each case due and fair consideration and we didn’t come to our decisions lightly.”

The twenty-one-year-old accountant Orlando Borrego, who administered La Cabaña’s finances, was also a tribunal president. “It was very difficult because most of us had no judicial training,” Borrego recalled. “Our paramount concern was to ensure that revolutionary morality and justice prevailed. Che was very careful. Nobody was shot for hitting a prisoner, but if there was extreme torture and killings and deaths, then yes—they were condemned to death. ... The whole case was analyzed, all the witnesses seen, and the relatives of the dead or tortured person came, or the tortured person himself.”

Che told some hostile Cuban television interviewers that he never attended the trials or met with defendants himself. He went over the cases with the judges and reached his final verdicts coldly and neutrally, on the basis of the evidence alone. According to Borrego, Che took great care in selecting judges and prosecutors. For instance, rebels who had been mis-treated were not allowed to pass judgment on their former torturers. “There were sometimes prosecutors who were on the extreme left,” Borrego explained. “One had to moderate those who always asked for the death sentence.” When it came to the executions themselves, however, Che evidently overcame his earlier reservations about the American volunteer Herman Marks, who had been a problem in Camagüey. Marks reappeared at La Cabaña, where he took an active role in the firing squads.
*

Over the next months, several hundred people were officially tried and executed by firing squads in Cuba. Most were sentenced in conditions like those described by Borrego. They were aboveboard, if summary, affairs, with defense lawyers, witnesses, prosecutors, and an attending public. But there were also a number of arbitrary executions. The most notorious incident occurred when, soon after occupying Santiago, Raúl Castro directed a mass execution of more than seventy captured soldiers. A trench was bulldozed and the condemned men were lined up in front of it and mowed down with machine guns. Raúl’s reputation for ruthlessness was confirmed.